4973. GARY, YOU'RE GETTING THROUGH TO ME

GARY, YOU'RE GETTING 

THROUGH TO ME

With perspicuous Eddie Barron, I walked the Cumberland

Gap, writing songs -  all sorts of things, in 1910, about

Johnny Appleseed and Daniel Boone; people like that.

Lewis and Clark, in fact, held it all down, that old and

monstrous raging river, the typecast hats of the traveling

minstrels, all black-face and ranting and foul. How even

an old slave could stand that, I never knew. But that was

then, before the circus, and its animal crackers and animals

and crackers had gotten established. Everything wandered 

and passed through town. I knew how it was.

-

Then time passed, and I was settled in with some tenement

housing in a broadening east side flat  -  knowing no one, still

alone. I walked the brown and black rooftops, looking down

to things below, those funny girls dancing, the crazy religious

manias sweeping through cities, the recalcitrant sword-fighters

re-enacting Shakespearean scene. Down below, far, down

below, some hundred Italians, I saw, were carrying a

statue of a saint, covered in dollar bills.